WordPress has been around a long, long time, and the company has maintained its commitment to keeping blogs free and available. Of course they would like it if you paid them for services like a custom domain or more storage, but you don’t have to.
Most geeky types, myself included are deep into static site generators like Hugo, Gatsby and Eleventy. It all began with Jekyll and Octopress, but those have fallen out of favor. There’s a big newness-hotness component to it. Hugo is already old, and Gatsby and Eleventy are hot at the moment.
But if you want to put out a blog with a nice theme, full-featured CMS and user comments managed through the same interface, WordPress is there for you. Even though I help manage comments for more than a dozen sites via Disqus, I prefer to use native WordPress comments when it’s manageable.